Category: Animation

Wildwood (2026)

Yes, the stop motion animation for Wildwood is indeed as impressive as everyone on YouTube and TikTok says! People spent months animating feathers and leaves flapping in the breeze! I spent a good part of the movie trying to figure out how they animated the murders of crows and flocks of birds.

It was unexpectedly funny, too, and not in an over exaggerated or goofy way.

“Did you just dry heave at me?”

(both swims in and eats from a bowl of venison stew) “Did you want some?”
(cringes) “No, thanks. I… stood in some food earlier.”

“I must be dreaming!”
(slaps her) “Does that feel like a dream?”

I was also oddly impressed by the realism of the baby’s voice throughout the movie. It sounds like someone painstakingly recorded a baby making all kinds of baby sounds to edit into the movie. For a while, I also thought the movie’s mascot rat was voiced by Envy from Fullmetal Alchemist, but alas, it was only Awkwafina.

The final battle scene was also very impressive, but it did contain a moment that completely pulled me out of the story, kind of for the rest of the movie. Tougher farmers, bandits, and coyotes fight most of the battle, but the protagonist Prue and her sidekick Curtis also weave in and out of the action. Prue pursues her baby brother, and Curtis helps fight where he can. In the course of his adventure, Curtis has befriended the mascot rat, who dies in the course of the final battle. The rat death scene is for everyone in the audience who has had a pet rat… BUT Prue has absolutely no reason to witness it! It should have been Curtis’ special moment while Prue was off saving her brother! She didn’t even know who the rat was! Somehow amidst all the action and her own goal, she sees this death happen and stops everything she’s doing to show the audience her sad face.

This somewhat inappropriate moment also drew attention to Prue and Curtis’ relationship, which in the end, felt forced. Prue straight up abandoned Curtis in the middle of the movie! She had evidence her baby brother was dead, not that Curtis was dead! The two of them had mostly separate adventures, so the awkward relationship they had at the start of the movie had little opportunity to grow closer believably.

In response to her praise at the end of the movie, Curtis tells Prue humbly that he didn’t do anything. Prue disagrees and tells him proudly that he did a lot… Well, he might be right that he didn’t do anything. He injected himself into Prue’s adventure to save her brother and had his own mostly inconsequential side quest. Maybe he warmed the bandits toward listening to her plea to fight the final battle, but she had “chosen one” vibes by the time she met them anyway. He introduced the audience to a lot of lore about the world, but he had little purpose in the story to be there. Even if I consider all this “doing a lot,” Prue wasn’t around to witness most of it and has no business telling him that.

Curtis’ apparent lack of purpose made me wonder what his role was supposed to be. If the baby didn’t exist and Prue’s mission was to save Curtis, his role might have made more sense. Curtis could have spent the movie in the witch’s custody while learning about the world and enlisting the bandits to help Prue free him. As it is, the baby has no agency to free itself and its lack of comprehension doesn’t make it a great character for the audience to learn about the world through. Curtis fulfills this role, but he’s not the baby. He’s a redundant, lackluster Prue, who doesn’t care about saving the baby as much as she does.

My analyzing the weaknesses in its story and character development aside, it was a good movie! I liked it a lot.

Solo Leveling (Seasons 1-2)

Both of the anime I watched recently, Kaiju No. 8 and Solo Leveling, felt rushed in some way. While watching Kaiju No. 8, my theory was that this was the new format of anime in an era of increasingly shortening attention spans. Or perhaps it was an anime for people who have watched so much anime that they can fill in the gaping holes in its character development with their favorite aspects of the common anime tropes each character represents. My latest theory is that these anime exist more as fan service for people who read the manga than as anime that can stand on their own. Considering I haven’t read these manga, this is speculation, but Kaiju No. 8 may have felt rushed because it was composed only of highlights from the manga.

Solo Leveling stands a bit better on its own and, overall, the pacing feels more natural. The protagonist Jinwoo Sung has a nice character arc across the two seasons. Where Solo Leveling falls short is its side characters. A classic anime like Naruto might spend multiple episodes on a side character’s or an enemy’s backstory (to the point where I just want the show to get on with killing them off). Solo Leveling, however, introduces side characters with just enough detail to make me want to know more but not so much that I can say I like or even know them. Side characters frequently appear in one or a small number of episodes for a few minutes, hinting that they might become important, only to never have any further importance. Even if they do become important later, some are forgettable enough that I wouldn’t recognize them. For example, I’m still not sure if the blond lady Sung saved in the final episode was the same lady who’s only trait was that she thought he smelled nice several episodes earlier.

From what I’ve heard of the manga, the side characters received more development, perhaps even chapters dedicated to explaining their backstories or showcasing their personalities. The anime might have cut even this relatively large amount of development out because it recognized they don’t matter. In the final episode, Sung states he would like to start a guild, perhaps one composed of all the side characters we’ve met throughout the series, and then the story ends.

This might be by design. Jinwoo Sung begins the series by lamenting how unfair life is and condemning everyone as heartless, selfish traitors. He spends the rest of the series focusing on his own development and the two people, his sister and his mom, that are important to him. He saves other characters not because he cares or has any emotional attachment to them but because he can and it’s the right/fair thing to do. In the video game-like world he inhabits, the side characters are NPCs that exist only to increase his sense of justice in a brutal world. As an anime, it’s dissatisfying to viewers for not developing the potential its side characters have, but this lack of focus reflects Sung’s disinterest in everyone well.

Kaiju No. 8 (Seasons 1-2)

The first episode of Kaiju No. 8 hooked me first for it uniquely telling its story from the perspective of Kafka, a guy who cleans up the guts of giant, dead monsters. Telling the story through someone on the cleanup crew was refreshingly different. The twist at the end, where Kafka is suddenly transformed into a monster, was also surprising.

From episode 2 onward, however, the series quickly fell into familiar tropes. Kafka’s dream of joining the Japanese Defense Force to fight kaiju felt like well-worn anime territory. The pacing, which felt like five seasons crammed into two, didn’t help. Character development felt rushed, often delivered through flashbacks rather than meaningful character interactions. Each new kaiju appearance felt like another “It’s over 9000!!!” moment. The side characters faced their greatest challenges moments after they explained why it was important to them. Most of the time, they failed and were thoroughly defeated, but because the pacing was so rushed, I didn’t connect with their struggles. I found it difficult to care about anyone.

It’s curious that American bands like OneRepublic were used for many of the opening, closing, and background music tracks, rather than the usual Japanese pop. Why is that? Was this anime targeted at Western audiences?